On Not Going Home
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/james-wood/on-not-going-home On Not Going Home James Wood I had a piano teacher who used to talk about the most familiar musical cadence – in which a piece returns, after wandering and variation, to its original key, the tonic – as ‘going home’. It seemed so easy when music did it: who wouldn’t want to swat away those black accidentals and come back to sunny C major? These satisfying resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the expected resolution, a dissonance sharpens its blade and seems about to wreck things – and is then persuaded home, as it should be. I wish I could hear that English cadence again, the way I first properly heard it in Durham Cathedral. I was 11 years old. During the lesson, we choristers had been exchanging notes, probably sniggering at one of the more pompous priests –
